Starring Milly Alcock, Supergirl is a visually ambitious DCU adventure that struggles to match its star’s charisma.
Every Superman story asks what someone does with power. Supergirl asks a different question: What happens when power comes after loss? That distinction gives the second film in DC Studios’ rebooted universe its identity. Where last year’s Superman framed heroism as a choice made in the presence of community, Supergirl explores what heroism looks like after community disappears.
Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) officially enters the DCU canon as a wanderer, survivor, and young woman who remembers Krypton (or an apocalyptic sliver of it) vividly enough to feel its absence. She carries history in a way Clark Kent never could. Earth gave him a home. Kara spends much of this film searching for one.
The result resembles a cosmic western, but also a revenge story. Oh, and a coming-of-age tale, of course. Director Craig Gillespie adapts the broad framework of Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and aims for something rougher around the edges than the polished optimism of Superman. The film pushes Kara into the role of reluctant mentor when she crosses paths with Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a girl seeking revenge against the brute who murdered her family. Together, they travel across a galaxy populated by scavengers, mercenaries, outlaws, and civilizations hanging on by their fingernails.
At its best, Supergirl understands that revenge stories rarely concern the actual revenge. They concern grief searching for a way out of that grief. The film continually places Ruthye’s desire for vengeance beside Kara’s unresolved relationship with loss. One character wants justice to restore meaning. The other already knows meaning doesn’t work that way. The tension between those perspectives drives the stronger scenes in the film and gives the story its emotional center, such that it is. It’s just too bad the film around it never quite gets off the ground.
Milly Alcock has main character energy.
Alcock owns the role from her first appearance. She plays Kara as someone perpetually caught between confidence and exhaustion. She swaggers through the film with often-boozy confidence, always aware that she’s the most interesting thing on screen, even if it’s a low bar (Lobo bar? Eh, we’ll get to that). Yet she also reveals the sadness beneath the bravado. Every joke feels like a defense mechanism. Every act of recklessness feels connected to a wound she never quite learned how to treat.
To be clear, the performance gives Kara a distinct identity from Superman without turning her into a straightforward inversion of him. Clark believes the universe deserves trust. Kara believes the universe requires constant scrutiny. That difference shapes every decision she makes, and Alcock sells that worldview through posture, timing, and sheer screen presence.
Every time the movie threatens to drift into another exposition asteroid field or another volume-up, stakes-down action sequence, Alcock grabs the wheel and steers the thing back toward something resembling personality. The same holds true for Krypto, who earns his paycheck. Though that paycheck must’ve amounted to pennies considering his screen time. That’s not necessarily a complaint, considering how much Krypto we already experienced in Superman.
Supporting stars.
For all its potential on paper, the film’s biggest challenge comes from the galaxy surrounding Kara. On one hand, Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira clearly want the universe to feel vast, strange, uncanny, and unpredictable. To achieve that effect, the movie hops between planets, cultures, and alien societies with impressive speed.
Every stop introduces a new flavor of science-fantasy weirdness straight out of the James Gunn playbook he established in Guardians of the Galaxy. The visual design embraces colorful cosmic excess and leans heavily into the idea that space should feel as dangerous as it is absurd and occasionally beautiful.
Yet the worldbuilding rarely develops beyond introduction. Characters pop in carrying the promise of complexity, then disappear before establishing much of an impression. In other words, the movie treats each encounter as another stop on the journey, which creates momentum but limits emotional investment. The galaxy keeps expanding outward while the relationships remain relatively small.
A glorified henchman.
That issue extends to the villain, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). The story presents him as the embodiment of cruelty without purpose. A man(?) who inflicts suffering because suffering is an option. To be fair, the concept fits neatly within the film’s larger conversation about revenge and justice. Ruthye wants to transform grief into violence. Kara wants her to understand the difference between justice and revenge. The villain exists as the test case for that argument. We’ve seen this movie more than a few times.
The problem is that the character functions more as a symbol than a presence. He occupies the story’s themes more successfully than he occupies the screen. In fact, I genuinely believed he was merely a henchman-type character for about the first 20 minutes.
That he was there to herald some other, more intriguing villain, like perhaps Jason Momoa‘s Lobo. Who instead shows up in a handful of scenes to liven up the proceedings without actually impacting the plot in any meaningful way. The definition of stunt casting. We already know thanks to Fast X that Momoa can bring the heat as a powerhouse foil. Not an easy-to-edit-out antihero who’s simply there to add some much-needed star-power to the casting.
And…action.
The action follows a similar pattern. At first glance, several sequences demonstrate impressive scale and a healthy budget. The spaceships crash, the blasters fire, and entire environments collapse. Meanwhile, Gillespie keeps the geography readable and the pacing brisk. Nevertheless, few set pieces linger in the memory after the credits roll. Rather than building action around character or imagination, the film repeatedly defaults to the modern superhero playbook: chaotic brawls, CGI lasers, and flying people transforming into flying missiles.
And that comparison becomes particularly noticeable after Superman. James Gunn’s film was a strong showcase in how action can reveal character. Every major sequence deepened its themes while being simultaneously entertaining. Supergirl often reaches for that same combination of offbeat charm and thematic heft, only to find itself holding a handful of loose change and a receipt from ten other movies it can’t stop mimicking. The aforementioned influence of Guardians of the Galaxy hangs over portions of the film. So does the broader DNA of contemporary space fantasy. The result often feels familiar when it wants to feel singular.
Even the visual effects contribute to that sensation. Some environments look fantastic. Others recall the upper limits of CW-era superhero television or the weightless digital spectacle that defined much of Marvel’s post-Endgame output. The aesthetic never fully settles on a consistent texture.
The bottom line.
Yet for all those frustrations, Supergirl remains surprisingly watchable. The film understands Kara as a character. It understands what makes her different from Clark. It understands the emotional wound that separates someone who remembers Krypton from someone who only inherited stories about it. Most importantly, it gives Milly Alcock the space to build a compelling interpretation of the character that could extend into stronger, better-crafted films with her in them.
So no, Supergirl never reaches the clarity, precision, or narrative confidence that made Superman such a pleasant surprise. It floats. It glides. And it cruises through its runtime on Alcock’s considerable charisma like a star cruiser running on fumes.
Supergirl opens in theaters on June 26. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros.
